Sunday, February 20, 2011

People sometimes seem surprised to learn that Bad Münstereifel is a real town. In fact, all the locations in The Vanishing of KatharinaLinden are real ones - the primary school, the red town hall, the ruined castle on the Quecken hill, etc. I visit Bad Münstereifel fairly often so I thought it would be fun to film a walking tour of some of these locations.

My second book, The Glass Demon, is also set in the Eifel, but I deliberately created fictional place names for the castle and the local towns. This is because many castles in the Eifel are still in private hands, and I didn't want the castle to be identified with anyone's real-life home. The castle in the book is an amalgam of several different castles and locations.

However, my third book, Wish me dead, which is being published in the UK by Penguin Books in June 2011, is once again set in Bad Münstereifel itself. The heroine of the story - Steffi Nett - is the daughter of a baker, and the bakery is part of the backdrop of the novel. For this reason, the video tour of the town also makes a stop at the Erft Cafe, my favourite bakery and cafe in Bad Münstereifel. Herr Nipp, the baker, was kind enough to help with the research for the book, as was Frau Quasten of the Bäckerei Cafe Quasten in Kommern.